Thanks Tom. That is what I expected to hear. Was being hopeful ...
On Mon, 25 Nov 2019 at 16:27, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>
> Bob Jolliffe <bobjolliffe@gmail.com> writes:
> > I have an interesting problem. I have a string field in a table which
> > (sometimes) is expected to contain numeric values ie. a cast of the
> > field to INTEGER is supposed to succeed.
>
> > My issue is that the application is running in Bangladesh, and
> > sometimes the users have entered values using Bangla characters. eg.
> > "৮" rather than "8". (Note that this shouldnt have been possible to
> > enter in the first place, but we can ignore that for now. They are
> > there, I have to somehow deal with it.)
>
> > Is there a way with LOCALE settings to get this cast to work
> > correctly?
>
> Doubt it :-(. ISTM it's certainly outside the charter of int4in to
> do that. Ideally to_number() would handle it, but I don't think it
> does at the moment. Probably your best bet is to translate those
> characters to regular ASCII digits using replace(), then cast.
> It'd be a bit tedious, but fortunately there are only 10 cases
> to consider, and you could wrap that up in a function.
>
> regards, tom lane